Low Life, High Speed

D.J. Taylor

June 1, 2012 5:13 p.m. ET

There have always been gangsters in the English novel. The 18th-century picaresques of Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett are stiff with low-lifers, street gangs and plausible con artists avid to swindle impressionable tourists out of their wallets. A century later, "Oliver Twist" (1838) borrowed enthusiastically from the sensationalizing "Newgate" genre pioneered by such pre-Dickensian best sellers as W.H. Ainsworth's "Rookwood" (1834) and Bulwer Lytton's "Eugene Aram" (1832). By the end of the Victorian era, novels like Arthur Morrison's "A Child of the Jago" (1896) had begun to sketch out the cartography of the London underworld. The geographical focus may change over time—the old Jago, a now demolished slum, was in London's East End, while many modern gangster novels take place in West End Soho—but the lifestyles and, curiously enough, the moral tone of the works resolutely endure.

Not the least of the British crime writer J.J. Connolly's achievements, consequently, has been his ability to tap into this 200- or 300-year tradition. The world of his two novels—"Layer Cake" (2000) and now its high-octane sequel, "Viva La Madness"—is bang up-to-date, full of the latest high-tech gadgetry and money-laundering scams, but Mr. Connelly is also keen on ancestry and heritage.

ENLARGE

The man in the Ferrari, the woman smoking a cigarette with her toes, the fellow clinging upside-down to a streetlamp—such memorable figures fill Anders Petersen's 'Soho' (Mack, 124 pages, $55). His grainy black-and-whites capture the London neighborhood's strange and seedy sides. With no explanatory text, the faces pass like pedestrians, and one can only wonder who that tatooed rockabilly woman could be or where the businessman with the bandaged forehead might be going.
Anders Petersen

Viva La Madness

By J.J. Connolly

Overlook, 446 pages, $25.95

The novels loudly advertise recent U.K. criminal history. There are several knowing references to "the Twins"—Reggie and Ronnie Kray, who ran the East End as their private fiefdom back in the 1960s. Even sharper evidence of Mr. Connolly's sense of continuity comes in his habit of dropping into his argot an antique phrase like "swell mobster," which the slang dictionaries date to the 1850s. There are swell mobsters in Morrison's "A Child of the Jago"—senior criminals, parading in their Sunday best for the edification of a neighborhood whose teenagers regard them as role models.

The action in Mr. Connolly's novels gallops by at a frantic pace. "Layer Cake" ripped through its catalog of maimings, murders, heists and exposures in not much more than a week of fictive time. Mr. Connolly himself turns out to be a slow worker. "Viva La Madness" seems to have occupied him for something like 11 years—no doubt interrupted by a commission to work on the first book's 2004 film adaptation. It was abundantly worth the wait.

Yet isolating the particular elements of Mr. Connolly's appeal to the non-crime fancier is not an easy trick to perform. Much of the tone in his novels is ironic, but the irony goes only so far. Most of the time he seems to appreciate, if not wholly to accept, many of the values of the world he writes about, in particular the idea that condign retribution awaits anyone who chooses to "grass up" (i.e., inform on) an accomplice. While his humor is regularly chastened by the outrages going on around it, there is an exuberance about Mr. Connelly's style that makes most "literary" novelists look uncomfortably sedate.

"Layer Cake," set in the late 1990s, limped to a close with its anonymous narrator ("My name? If I told you that, you'd be as clever as me") recovering from a brush with death, and the jealous boyfriend of a woman he was pursuing. "Viva La Madness," precisely dated to the late summer of 2001, finds him holed up in Barbados awaiting the arrival of his old associate Morty ("Mr. Mortimer") and deeply discomfited by the simultaneous appearance at the baggage carousel of two drug-dealer chums eager to deposit nearly £3 million of used notes in a nearby bank vault.

Some 400 pages later, the Connolly fan will be conscious that nearly everything on display here is cut from the "Layer Cake" pattern, which is to say that the labyrinthine plot has our hero getting mixed up in a riot of additional schemes that he hadn't bargained for; deducing that the kingpin he serves is duplicitous; and then benefiting from a bizarre circumstantial twist that readies up the last-page bailout. Moving back and forth across the Atlantic, and involving gangs of Venezuelan hoodlums shooting their way around London's West End, the novel ends, with maximum adroitness, in New York on the morning of 9/11.

In keeping with the tradition from which it derives, "Viva La Madness" displays attractions that are not only procedural but also sociological and even linguistic. As well as having a knack for martini-dry one liners, Mr. Connolly proves to be a dab hand at cockney rhyming slang, to the point where some of his usages may be thought to demand a glossary for those not born within earshot of Bow Bells. "Richards," naturally, can be deciphered as "women" ("Richard the Third" = "bird"). It seems likely that the character said to be wearing a "three-piece whistle with twenty-four-inch lionels" is dressed in an exceptionally flamboyant suit ("whistle" = "whistle and flute" = "suit"; "lionel" = "Lionel Blair" = "flare"). A "kanga" is an oblique version of prison warder (from "kangaroo" and thence "screw").

Even more complex, perhaps, is the morality that lies at the novels' core. This could best be described as a kind of warped Romanticism, built on a surface hankering for "respect," solidarity and tradition but at the same time declaring a fatal tendency—sometimes a literally fatal tendency—to disintegrate under pressure. Mr. Connolly's characters—the intelligent ones, anyway—pride themselves on professionalism, steer clear of nutters and despise the no-account amateurs who "act flash." They approve of history books and communal awareness. "If you know your history, your struggle, your lineage," the racially conscious, black-skinned Mr. Mortimer lectures his younger associate, "you know who you f—in' are." Family is all-important. ("That's somebody's daughter," Morty laments when pornographic stills of a woman who may be trying to assassinate him are publicly displayed.) Mainstream society is occasionally envied but more often that not merely ignored. The worst punishments are reserved for informers and child-abusing "nonces."

Oddly, the questions of identity that Mr. Connolly lingers over eventually involve both reader and character. If we end up sympathizing with and even rooting for his hero (responsible for at least two murders, during one of which a hit man shoots an innocent passerby), it is because of the hero's ultimate vulnerability, the sense that his journey in search of the person he really is will always be doomed to failure. There is a rather dreadful moment in "Viva La Madness" in which he watches the London commuters on their way to work through the early-morning suburbs and reflects: "I'd be homesick if I knew where home was." And so Mr. Connolly's novels, for all their ever-present reek of cordite, their Darwinian struggles for mastery, their gallows humor and their passionate engagement with every bent caper you care to name, are a great deal closer to "serious fiction" than pulp. Their real theme, it turns out, is deracination.

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